Saturday, September 01, 2018

Visualizing Travel data in Tableau

Tableau has made a name for itself partly by using the freemium business model. This is what vendors do to get you to use the product. In the case of Tableau, their platform allows you to use a free version of the product with the catch that you must save to the cloud for all to see. Sounds like a good trade-off.

So I went ahead and collected data from https://travel.trade.gov/, which by the way, is in serious need of a design makeover. Sorry, but just calling it like I see it.

Taking the data was easy since it was in Excel, but it was already in matrix form, so I had to manually put it back in tabulated form using Excel, and then I was able to collect 3 year's worth of counts of U.S. travelers going to different regions of the world.

The insights you can see clearly is that Europe is the all favorite international destination, that it keeps becoming more popular and that June is by far the most popular time to travel. The line chart also lets you see a dip in the Caribbean region during September of 2017 which is when hurricane Irma happened.

Sure, you could do all this with Excel, but I think Tableau has earned its place as an application solely for visualization.